San Francisco or Iowa?

[Trekker4747]

Why can't the ship be partially constructed on earth and then raised into orbit and launched from the "SF Shipyard" after it's internals are completed?

Isn't there a scene in TNG that shows a Galaxy (or similar) class being built on the ground from orbit?

There's a picture of pieces of the ship laying on the ground from a sattelite imagery in "Paralells."

It suggests the ship was built in pieces on Mars' surface (which would have the similar low-G and atmospheric hurtles of orbital construction.) Not that the entire ship was built on the ground in one fell swoop.

And for all we know it could be a "junkyard" for discarded components or a storage lot for components to be tractored in space or, hell, the pieces could be in orbit with the gound just being in the background.

 

[FordSVT]

Mars' gravity is about 40% of the earth's, hardly parallel to zero G. These people have anti-gravity lifts and warp drives, 40% or 100% isn't going to matter. What I said is speculation, but not impossible.

As for the rest of your post, for all we know it wasn't a junkyard. That last bit about perspective is pretty ridiculous, regardless of what those pieces "really" were, they were clearly not intended by the producers to be positioned between the ground and the camera.

 

[Trekker4747]

Mars' gravity is about 40% of the earth's, hardly parallel to zero G. These people have anti-gravity lifts and warp drives, 40% or 100% isn't going to matter. What I said is speculation, but not impossible.

As for the rest of your post, for all we know it wasn't a junkyard. That last bit about perspective is pretty ridiculous, regardless of what those pieces "really" were, they were clearly not intended by the producers to be positioned between the ground and the camera.

Yeah, that last part was a stretch I admit.

Mars' lower gravity would still present a working challenge over working in 1G.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

There's a picture of pieces of the ship laying on the ground from a sattelite imagery in "Paralells."

Rick Sternbach gives us his perspective on that installation in this post. Andrew Probert, here, leaves little doubt concerning where he thinks the NCC-1701-D was assembled.

TGT

 

[FordSVT]

^Sternbach could go either way, and while I admit that Probert's opinion should probably be weighed more heavily than most anyone else's in the end it's just opinion. What's on screen counts, and none of it is conclusive.

Hey, I'd assume they were all built in orbit too, I'm just playing the same game of "how can we make this all fit" we've been playing for years now. And we have been playing this game for years, decades; STXI is not the first time continuity and canon have had to be sorted out in a frenzy of blood and teeth-gnashing.

 

[Timo]

In the end, we are up against a considerable conceptual challenge: why, with starships as mighty and capable as the one we saw in TOS, would Earth still so much resemble the 1960s in terms of spinoff technologies.

If Earth can operate a Constitution class vessel, Earth should be capable of building one wherever one wants, using aesthetics as the main decisive factor since all technological and economical concerns would be utterly moot. The hypertechnologies demonstrated in the ship would not be sensitive to such minor issues as 1G acceleration, 50C temperature changes, 100% humidity changes or the cost of hauling raw materials from another star system.

In our struggle to explain why Earth is so primitive when its starships are not, we can take at least three approaches: 1) the military gets all the good stuff, the civilians suffer, 2) tradition, union rules and superstitious fear of technology hinder the spread of spinoffs, and/or 3) the rapid progress made in starships is but a fluke, the result of contact with advanced starfaring species, and so poorly understood by Earth engineers that they haven't been able to reverse-engineer any spinoffs yet.

To explain why the ship would be built primitively on the ground, or even more primitively in orbit, rather than simply materialized at the snap of fingers, I'd prefer to go the 2) route, because routes 1) and 3) put our Starfleet heroes in negative light while route 2) only disparages the other parts of mankind...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ROBE]

Materialized at the snap of the fingers would be a bit boring and isn't their a size limit for replicated items? Star Fleet could only replicate items up to a certain size, if you wanted big objects you still had to assemble them like a giant model kit. It is much more dramatic and romantic to have human workers building a massive ship, rather than press a button and "hay presto" instant ship.

As for building it on Earth, with current technology it is easier to launch bits of a larger object into space and then build it up their. However Star Trek has antigravity and artificial gravity technology so they should have no problem building big on Earth and then putting a large ship into space with antigravity pilot ships.

 

[Butters]

Materialized at the snap of the fingers would be a bit boring and isn't their a size limit for replicated items? Star Fleet could only replicate items up to a certain size, if you wanted big objects you still had to assemble them like a giant model kit. It is much more dramatic and romantic to have human workers building a massive ship, rather than press a button and "hay presto" instant ship.

As for building it on Earth, with current technology it is easier to launch bits of a larger object into space and then build it up their. However Star Trek has antigravity and artificial gravity technology so they should have no problem building big on Earth and then putting a large ship into space with antigravity pilot ships.

Yep, replicated starships sure would be boring, but it is one of the failings of magical properties of Trek tech. If you can replicate a banana, or a drum kit, why can't you replicate a starship? Sure, its a more complicated and energy intensive process, but a factory could have multiple 'replicator heads', which manufacture each component insitu and build up, layer by layer. That is the natural extension to replicator technology.

The only in-world explanation, that I can see, to involve people in the construction process at all is job creation. People want to build starships as a break from fishing, partying, climbing mountains, or whatever else they would otherwise fill their time with while machines managed their every need and whim.

 

[Timo]

Of course, our reality suffers from the same "dramatic conceits". There exist very complex practical reasons as to why we e.g. still don't have flying cars even though airplanes were invented a century ago. If somebody tried to give equally complex (and equally realistic) explanations as to why starships aren't replicated, the audience would simply go "that's unrealistically complicated, just face it, the writers dropped the ball here". "Realism" has different definitions on the different sides of the silver screen.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Butters]

Of course, our reality suffers from the same "dramatic conceits". There exist very complex practical reasons as to why we e.g. still don't have flying cars even though airplanes were invented a century ago. If somebody tried to give equally complex (and equally realistic) explanations as to why starships aren't replicated, the audience would simply go "that's unrealistically complicated, just face it, the writers dropped the ball here". "Realism" has different definitions on the different sides of the silver screen.

Timo Saloniemi

Quite true and for that reason, I personally, would rather see the reason for manual construction (be it in space or ground level) kept off the screen. They're built on the ground, by people, because they are.

Perhaps they're built on the ground, just thought, so that people can visit and watch them being built. I certainly would.

 

[Franklin]

In the end, we are up against a considerable conceptual challenge: why, with starships as mighty and capable as the one we saw in TOS, would Earth still so much resemble the 1960s in terms of spinoff technologies.

If Earth can operate a Constitution class vessel, Earth should be capable of building one wherever one wants, using aesthetics as the main decisive factor since all technological and economical concerns would be utterly moot. The hypertechnologies demonstrated in the ship would not be sensitive to such minor issues as 1G acceleration, 50C temperature changes, 100% humidity changes or the cost of hauling raw materials from another star system.

In our struggle to explain why Earth is so primitive when its starships are not, we can take at least three approaches: 1) the military gets all the good stuff, the civilians suffer, 2) tradition, union rules and superstitious fear of technology hinder the spread of spinoffs, and/or 3) the rapid progress made in starships is but a fluke, the result of contact with advanced starfaring species, and so poorly understood by Earth engineers that they haven't been able to reverse-engineer any spinoffs yet.

To explain why the ship would be built primitively on the ground, or even more primitively in orbit, rather than simply materialized at the snap of fingers, I'd prefer to go the 2) route, because routes 1) and 3) put our Starfleet heroes in negative light while route 2) only disparages the other parts of mankind...

Timo Saloniemi

Excellent post.

A society with the technology to build starships should be able to build them anywhere they want to. Period. Pieces of space stations the size of the Enterprise or larger are probably fabricated on Earth and sent into space for final construction fairly regularly.

That said, after reading your post, I think it makes great sense from within the Trek world to see the Enteprise being built by "primitive" construction means (either in space or on the ground). It's the human element. Think of the TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer," and where our heroes came down on the issue. Today, there are advocates for completely unmanned exploration of space. They cite safety and economies of scale as reasons. Same in the military. Unmanned war planes. Unmanned tanks. But that's not Star Trek. The human gets involved at every level. We still get our hands dirty.

As Timo says, the technology of the ship betrays what looks like a comparatively primitive construction technique. But I'd say seeing the Enterprise with scaffolding and around it and having components assembled just as we'd build a ship or aircraft today grounds it (no pun intended). It humanizes it. People built that ship. It's not that it's being done on the ground. That misses the point. It would be the same if it were built by hand in space. It is poetic license, technologically. You wouldn't build a starship the same way battleships were built. But it's completely Star Trek. In that world, it works.